Chasing Ghosts by Glenn Rolfe

Author:Glenn Rolfe [Rolfe, Glenn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sinister Grin Press
Published: 2016-07-31T21:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

Luke Howard opened his eye to the black world that had become his home. The hunger pains awoke with him. He’d hoped that he’d acclimate to the constant hurt. His left eye, the one the little monster took from him, no longer made him cry. It was only a dull ache from where his captors had burned it shut.

He wasn’t sure how long he’d been here. Long enough to know that his mother probably thought he was dead. Dead like Jesse and Davey. Despite what had been done to him, he didn’t want to join them.

His father had been killed two years ago. He’d been in the military most of Luke’s childhood and deployed for a good third of it. Friendly fire was the official story. All his time overseas, all the stuff he’d made it through, and an accident robbed him from them.

If he’d inherited anything from his dad it was an iron will. What he lacked in bravery, Luke made up for with a determined stubbornness and an unnatural ability to find the brightness on the bad side of life.

He’d broken his arm when he fell at a playground back in New Hampshire. He was seven or eight. His mother had lost an earring from her grandmother there a month before. While he was on the ground holding his arm, he spotted the green emerald under the corner of the slide. She rushed to his side. He told her he was okay and pointed to the earring. “Something positive,” he said. “From a negative,” she responded.

He stared at the darkness around him.

They’d dragged Jesse and Davey’s bodies out the day after the attacks.

He’d covered his wound with a piece of Jesse’s t-shirt–he knew it’d been Jesse by the slenderness of the body–but had since cast the rag away. There was no point. He might as well be in a coffin. No light penetrated this cell. Any concerns of infection had passed. He tried not to think about what they’d done with their bodies. He figured they’d stuck them in here with him to hide them or to scare him, or both. It was when the little one, a child who he refused to think of as such, licked his face and bit his cheek, and then proceeded to claw his eyeball from its socket while two others held him down, that he buried the idea that these were people. He hadn’t seen it happen, but he was certain the little monster had eaten its trophy.

His ankles were bound in barbed wire. He thought something awful like gangrene would get him for sure. His mother’s aunt had suffered a bad break in her leg from a car accident. She’d lost the leg a week and a half later when it started to smell. She’d nearly died.They’d left his hands and arms free. He tried to release his ankles, but the twisted ends wouldn’t budge, and without anything to cut the metal wire with, it was useless.

The same two always came in.

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